About County of Santa Clara Public Health Department

The County of Santa Clara Public Health Department works to prevent disease and injury, promote healthy lifestyles, create healthy environments, and advocate for policy and systems changes that advance department priorities. We care deeply about our mission and work daily to achieve our vision that all people thrive in healthy and safe communities.

Our Mission

To protect and improve the health of our community

Our Vision

All people thrive in healthy and safe communities

Our Core Values

• Excellence: We use data and best practices to ensure high quality services and programs for our community.
• Equity: We integrate strategies into our work that address injustices and structural inequities to reduce health disparities.
• Diversity and Collaboration: We honor diversity, inclusion, and community collaboration in all that we do.
• Accountability: We demonstrate the effectiveness of our work and share progress with our community.
• Integrity: We build trust through open, honest, and transparent communication and by staying true to our commitments.

Our Commitment to Excellence

County of Santa Clara Public Health Department is proud to have earned national accreditation from the Public Health Accreditation Board in March 2016. Accreditation means that we have demonstrated our commitment to promoting and protecting the health of the public by continuously improving the quality of our services and the performance of our work. We successfully demonstrated our performance against 32 nationally recognized, practice-focused and evidence-based standards across 12 public health domains.

The Public Health Department has a strong focus on quality improvement:

• We care that our messages and services are understood by all, so we offer language assistance at all our locations.
• We ensure excellent customer service by regularly gathering client and partner feedback to identify areas for improvement. If you have feedback for us, please let us know.
• We have internal quality teams that continuously work on making our services highly efficient and effective for the residents of Santa Clara County.
• We prioritize racial and health equity as a foundational goal for everything we do. From infant mortality to life expectancy, race too often predicts health outcomes. To close the gaps in health disparities and improve outcomes for all, we must address the underlying systemic and institutional biases that allow these inequities to persist.